Epson EVF panel--beginning of the end for new RF designs?

[picker77]

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09101501epsonhtpspanel.asp

Does this enable a sea change in digital camera design? No external focusing system, no mirrors, no prisms, no rangefinder calibration hassles, fast manual and autofocus possibilities, WSIWYG, ad infnitum.

 

[aniMal]

This will surely be an improvement, and EVFs will be very common in some years. But how can 800x600 even get near what an eye resolves? I would imagine that one really needs 10 times the pixels to get something that looks like an optical finder...

 

[Bugleone]

Interesting,..although EVF in serious camera systems has been a certainty for some time now as the EVF is much cheaper to make than SLR moving mirror design.

I can't see that it means either the end of the rangefinder or, sadly, the end of focus problems as the lens must still be actually brought to optimum focus on the image plane/sensor.

Hopefully, good EVF's will at last bring in true 2nd generation digital systems and finally displace the black plastic 35mm SLR which first apeared as the Canon T90 in the 1970's. Apart from wedging a sensor inside in place of film there has not been much innovation and the camera industry is very conservative with virtually each maker offering the same item in each market slot.

The downside, I fear, is that cameras are probably going to go the way of camcorders,...ie,...cheap and nasty manufacture with poor reliability and short life which ends because it costs more to fix than its supposedly worth. The manufacturers answer being,..'just buy a new one for more money'.....

Part of the problem with cameras now is that only one cultrure produces them and that culture is not very interrested in European feelings about photography and camera systems.

For me, that is the great hope and chance of the digital Leicas,...they take at least a small part of the camera industry back to Europe........

For my next digital system i would like good detachable EVF,..square sensor 24mm x 24mm,.....full sensor RAW,...horiz/vert JPEG by touch pad,......ability to use adaptors fro all 35mm lenses,....detachable sensor unit...

 

[aniMal]

Haven´t really thought about the industry being a monoculture, but when you put it that way it really rings true with me!

I remember how great it felt using my M8 for the first 2-3 hours, I was able to relax and work with it like any old M from the very start. The menu is easy to work with, it is a metal housing and demands that you put yourself to use as a photographer. Also the colour rendition is different, sometimes hard to work with, but it has a potential that is really great.

Altogether it is built on a totally different philosophy, and thus is a counter-weight to the monoculture. And, it only takes one foreign organism to end a monoculture!

I think the modular build of the M8 is a great advantage. I hope and believe that the M9s will be coming out almost fault-free, just because a lot of the innards are by now well tested with the M8s.

How about a cheap M, with a metal body and an EVF of high quality? Kind of like a cross between an M and an X1? Make it weather sealed and padded for abuse - I would buy one if it was reasonably priced... Sooner or later better EVFs will impinge on RFs, but before it reaches full resolution it will not replace the 50 year old technology of Leica...

 

[Bob Ross]

This may just the first of a new generation of EVFs or the second if you count Panasonic's EVF in the G1. Getting away from the LCD technology and going to the OLED technology will introduce some more needed improvements. Watch Samsung.
Rather than replace current designs, it probably will be another tool, at least for a while. A silent camera would be welcome at many venues and sometimes seeing a mostly processed version of the image can be useful.
Resolution, refresh rate and color accuracy are the determining factors to how close the EVFs can get to the current optical viewfinders. I suspect SLRs will be as reluctant to die as rangefinders.
Bob

 

[ulrikft]

For me, a EVF camera with good resolution would be great if the quality can compare with a nice optical VF, imagine the MF-opportunities.. 🙂

 

[Richard Marks]

Intersting
If the moving mirror goes from SLR design and the viewing image really is good enough to use then the advantages of the rangefinder are certainly diminished in terms of slow shutter speed. As for focusing, if the area of interest can be enlarged, manual focusing could theoretically be more accurate than a rangefinder. Theres a lot of ifs here. The system in the G1 certainly does not quite do it for me. Lets wait and see!
Richard

 

[Nemo]

The M9.2 will bring minor improvements (I would like a more MP-like finish, this is, without red or black dots or "M9" engravings), but I am more interested on how the M10 should be. CMOS sensor, live view and an accesory electronic viewfinder (for teles, macro, wide angle M lenses, Tri-Elmars, R lenses). An accesory will not compromise the classic form and handling of M cameras... expanding the possibilities... It is the next logical step. I would like to see an even simpler interface, taken from the S2 camera. Only 4 modal buttons and a wheel (where the rewind knob was, for a cleaner back of the camera).

Olympus announces the E-P2 the next November 5th, and it has an accesory viewfinder with 1,4 Mp of resolution and 1,15x of magnification.

http://43rumors.com/ft5-ladies-and-gentleman-43rumors-has-the-first-olympus-e-p2-image/

This is as I see the future M cameras... just like the M9, viewfinder and rangefinder included. The EVF would be just an accesory. We have accesory viewfinders now, isn't? The most versatile is the Frankenfinder, but it is ugly, big and expensive. An EVF alternative would be cheaper, smaller and even more versatile. If you want your classical M camera, just use it in the traditional way. At this moment M macro lenses need "googles"; extreme wide-angle lenses need accesory optical viewfinders; tele lenses beyond 135mm cannot be used on the Ms; R lenses cannot be properly focused... All this would be solved with just an accesory electronic viewfinder. It is a really simple solution, not very expensive and it brings a solution for R users.
.

 

[Frankie]

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09101501epsonhtpspanel.asp

Does this enable a sea change in digital camera design? No external focusing system, no mirrors, no prisms, no rangefinder calibration hassles, fast manual and autofocus possibilities, WSIWYG, ad infnitum.

Picker77 is correct in his thinking.

As already posted elsewhere:

I recently had an opportunity in a Tokyo camera-mart [Yodobashi] seeing through the GH-1 and GF-1 EVF and the optical EP-1 view finder...side by side. The EP-1 optical is still the best, but the GH-1 is not far behind...the GF-1 simply not good enough. Given my mature eyesight, I could no longer argue against a good EVF...especially with its built-in diopter adjustment.

The new Epson 1.4 Mp device matches the GH-1 and will enable anyone...the first being the EP-2...to built an EVF as good as the GH-1. I would expect the pressure for an immediate upgrade of the GF-1 EVF is on.

As would be expected, the next generation EVF device will have 2.8Mp, and the next...available next spring.

As to how great our eyeballs might be, the native resolution is really just ~1 arc-minute [or ~0.3mm per metre], regardless what device we are looking at or through. This, and constraint by the "Focal Length to Base" ratio, underwrite the entire RF doctrine.

A discussion in better understanding of that is more useful than dogma.

 

[ZeissFan]

This might affect the consumer market but certainly not the pro market.

Despite what everyone says about electronic viewfinders, they suck, especially if you're shooting at night, because they're brightness affects one eye by closing your iris, while the non-shooting eye remains open.

Also, they contribute to shutter lag by forcing the camera to focus, lock focus and update the viewfinder/LCD screen.

 

[Roger Hicks]

The beginning of the end for new 35mm RFs was probably the Nikon F in 1959. There have not been many new small formatRFs since the early 60s: basically, just Leica and Cosina.

I can't see the relevance of this finder to RFs, though. How do you focus? Barring AF, you need either a rangefinder or a viewing screen. How is an EVF supposed to change this?

Cheers,

R.

 

[kywong]

not sure about it being the end of RF, but interesting times for sure.

 

[sevo]

The beginning of the end for new 35mm RFs was probably the Nikon F in 1959. There have not been many new small formatRFs since the early 60s: basically, just Leica and Cosina.

At least if we restrict that to successful interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinders - there was some more movement in fixed-lensers up to the mid seventies.

I can't see the relevance of this finder to RFs, though. How do you focus?

On the EVF. Which won't affect rangefinders - it is functionally a SLR replacement. It is a fairly safe prediction that digital video and photographic cameras will at least technically merge (market wise, both may seem to be around for quite some time - selling the same technology twice as "video" and "photo" seems too much of a profit opportunity to drive the development of ergonomically satisfying hybrids before market saturation sets in). But a immediate and anticipatory control of the actual recorded signal makes far more sense than the half-digital "D"SLR of today, and rationalizing away the whole labour intensive SLR finder and shutter precision mechanics is after the heart of every modern consumer goods manager as well - the EVF is destined to kill the DSLR.

 

[justins7]

Nothing beats a mechanical rangefinder for low-light manual focusing. My Contax rangefinder is still dead-on easy to focus in darkness. I don't see how ANY EVF can top that.

 

[Nikon Bob]

I think a really good EVF and by that I mean one that comes close to an optical one would work well on an RF type camera. What you see in the EVF is the angle of view of whatever lens you choose to put on it. To focus the central portion of the EVF enlarges to allow precise focusing of MF lenses. You want an RF you off set the EVF to one side or if you prefer the SLR look it can be in the middle. Clearly this type of camera could replace both the SLR and RF types of cameras. It would need to be one heck of an EVF though and it looks like that is the directions things are moving in. It has all the possibilities to be an exciting new direction for cameras to take.

Bob

 

[jreid]

The Epson technology is one interesting aspect of what the future may hold. When the announcement was made I gave it a bit of thought and wrote about it on my blog (can't link to it here). It was encouraging to me to hear Rudi Spiller comment about this subject (thought obviously not the Epson announcement) on 9/9/9 -- “We have concepts in hand where our development engineers are working on presently already … There’s a number of findings which we think is kind of a time leap for Leica for the future.” He wouldn't go into specifics, which is not a surprise.
I'd like to see someone pull a "Barnack" and put the pieces together and come up with something that moves past the limitations of SLRs, rangefinders and point & shoots to produce something truly innovative, as the ur-Leica was nearly a century ago.

 

[JoeV]

Nothing beats a mechanical rangefinder for low-light manual focusing. My Contax rangefinder is still dead-on easy to focus in darkness. I don't see how ANY EVF can top that.

I've used mechanical rangefinders. And I've used my Lumix G1, which has an EVF whose quality has set the standard by which all other consumer camera EVFs are measured.

The EVF electronically amplifies the ambient light level of a dimly lit scene, permitting focus in situations where there's simply not enough light to properly see focus in a rangefinder (or situations where, in dim light, there's a lack of vertical lines to judge focus accurately).

The EVF permits judgement of focus directly onto the sensor itself; there's no problem of mechanical tolerances between the lens cam and the rangefinder mechanism between various lenses. The EVF focus works equally well on u4/3 lenses as on manual legacy lenses adapted for u4/3 use.

The rangefinder (typically, depending on lens focal length and rangefinder magnification factor) permits one to see outside the picture taking area, perhaps its biggest advantage over TTL viewfinding.

For judging focus in dim light the G1's EVF is simply better than a rangefinder; case closed. The real issue worth arguing about is the low-light performance of the sensor, relative to film; that's still an open issue.

~Joe

 

[Nikon Bob]

Joe

I think a D700 type sensor coupled with an EVF in a smaller package the size of am Nikon FM might be an interesting proposition for low light shooting.

Bob

 

[georgef]

I liked looking through my RD-1 VF better than my G1 but the G1 EVF is certainly easier to focus in any light, beven though it gets trickier in low light. With the magnification for MF there is no contest with an RF.

I think the argument against EVFs in the future is based on sentimentality more than reality; the superiority of the OVF that has been evolved for over 50 years to the EVF that has only been seriously developed for less than 5 will certainly diminish as the technology develops.
I think rangefinder photography will cease in terms of the technology, but not in terms of the process; the new breed of "RF's" will be in the form of small, bright, fast and quiet digitals with very good sensors. the process of the inobtrusive, non-SLR way of taking pictures will remain through new tools.
One thing is for sure IMHO: optically tied range finding mechanisms will go the way of the motordrives: they will simply not be necessary.

FLAMESUIT ON! 😀

 

[sevo]

I think rangefinder photography will cease in terms of the technology,

Rangefinders are a fringe technology, dead on the mass market for almost forty years - EVF won't replace it any more than electric cars will replace horse-drawn carriages.

Sevo